Metropol

Jamez wrote:

DJGM wrote: Here's a quick screengrab of Windows Defender Beta 2 running a "Quick Scan" on my system earlier . . .

A quickscan on my system takes less than a minute.

I'm guessing your system is somewhat faster than my 450Mhz PII (512MB RAM) then . . .

Just a bit

Although I've just got another load of 512mb memory, so I've now got 1024mb. Handy for Photoshop tasks and making porn sites.

Oh, and I bought that 19" widescreen TFT from eBuyer. I'm astounded at the speed in which it arrived. I ordered it 2 weeks ago today at 3.50pm, and a knock on the front door at 9.45am the next morning with it!!!!

It's a fabulous monitor and the price is excellent. So much so, two of my mates have bought one too!

I know... that's why I ditched my cracked XP Pro for the legit XP Home, even though it had OEM shite on.

It's easy to protect your PC for free these days. Nobody should be running a PC without at least ZoneAlarm and AVG. Both free products and both very good ones too conisdering they cost nowt.

James Martin wrote: Nobody should be running a PC without at least ZoneAlarm and AVG . . .

There one or two exceptions to that ...

Not all PC users have their systems connected to the internet, so a firewall program would be effectively redundant.
(Although it is still worth having a decent antivirus program installed, even if the PC is to remain permanently offline.)

Not all PC users have Windows installed, so both ZoneAlarm and AVG would be completely useless to them.

I'm now on XP SP2 and now I have a green shield in the task bar which is Windows Security Center.

It says it has a built in firewall, and is recommended that I do NOT install a second one.

Hmm...

NB: I'm running Norton Anti-Virus auto protect. Seems to be doing a good job so far, and Ad Aware has only found 36 bugs, which have turned out to be relatively harmless cookies.

The answer is not to get/run a virus checker at all, which are simply programs whose popularity is propogated by the overzealous media and technophobic PC users; anyone who just opens applications or downloads p2p without selecting an audio file format filter, etc., must have an idiot level approaching 100% and deserves to get one. By employing common sense (EDIT: and knowing the common ploys -- that's important too!) it's impossible to open a virus.

cdd wrote:The answer is not to get/run a virus checker at all, which are simply programs whose popularity is propogated by the overzealous media and technophobic PC users; anyone who just opens applications or downloads p2p without selecting an audio file format filter, etc., must have an idiot level approaching 100% and deserves to get one. By employing common sense (EDIT: and knowing the common ploys -- that's important too!) it's impossible to open a virus.

you are wrong - there have been a number of viruses and worms which have relied upon vulnerabilities in critical windows services, like RPC, and recently people have found ways to run executable code from malformed wmf files - whilst visiting a website with such an image would require user interaction i don't accept that it is something you could simply avoid by having common sense. the rpc flaw (corrected in sp2 allowed people to run executable code on your pc with NO user interaction at all)

most people assume that their webbrowser is a 'sandbox' which prevents anything nasty from entering their pc which they don't want... this has proven not to be true in all the popular browsers and with the increasing sophistication of operating systems these days you'd be pretty silly not to sit behind a firewall with some sort of antivirus software.

and if you think you're safe on a mac: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/02/08 ... erability/

cdd wrote:The answer is not to get/run a virus checker at all, which are simply programs whose popularity is propogated by the overzealous media and technophobic PC users; anyone who just opens applications or downloads p2p without selecting an audio file format filter, etc., must have an idiot level approaching 100% and deserves to get one. By employing common sense (EDIT: and knowing the common ploys -- that's important too!) it's impossible to open a virus.

oh here we go again. You'll be infected within a week like the last time you preached that.